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much like play in helping younger members of
the species develop essential skills. Proffered excuses — “I was just joking!” and “Can’t you
take a joke?” — provide the wiseacre the opportunity to practice aggressive and social dominance behaviors while minimizing the risk of
diminished social status in the event of failure.
And the comeuppance of bullies is a staple in
comedy. Meanwhile, the teams of Burns and
Allen and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz allow
watchers to ponder sex-role socialization.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Roseanne entertain by subverting patriarchy. And topical
humor of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor vents
people’s anger at social ills.

Along these lines, social psychologists suggest
that humor fosters in-groups and out-groups and
other social relationships, including romance and
friendships. For example, teasing can reinforce
group norms, demonstrate that one has the seniority or power to comment on the behavior of others,
ingratiate oneself with someone of a higher status,
or enhance solidarity by providing a shared affective experience. Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, The Honeymooners, Cheers, Freaks and Geeks, John
Hughes teen films, and, today, Girls, New Girl and
Awkward. hinge on these tenets. Friends proved a
prime example of must-see TV for the with-it.
Women bond over so-called chick flicks.

Pioneering psychologist Paul Ekman and colleagues even identified a characteristic facial expression associated with humor. A smile appears
through a constellation of facial muscle contractions; what Ekman called the “Duchenne display” involves the zygomatic muscle that pulls
up the corner of the lips and the orbicularis
oculi muscles that orbit the eye. This visage reliably distinguishes between smiles of enjoyment
and those that bespeak smirks, grimaces and
other false positives. Ekman’s research reveals
that only law enforcement officers, judges and
lawyers, therapists, and abused children scored
reliably better than chance at distinguishing between real and fake smiles — people who depend on being able to tell the difference — as
Malcolm Gladwell summarizes in “The Naked
Face” in The New Yorker in August 2002. Interestingly, comedy of manners and drawing room
comedies make much of real versus fake smiles.

Sources of humor

Accounts by social and evolutionary psychologists explicate primarily why people joke
around, not how. Drive theory, object relations,
and self psychology shed distinctive light on the
interpersonal and intrapersonal factors that contribute to humor.

In Sigmund Freud’s drive theory, humor permits partial or disguised gratification of unacceptable wishes. Because these yens are unconscious and anxiety-provoking, they can be allowed into semi-awareness only when camouflaged. This means Freud would thoroughly
disagree with the premise of Seinfeld, billed as a
comedy series about “nothing”! Humor also expresses and discharges anxiety, something
Woody Allen turns to over and over again.

Anxiety arises from the clash among the three
warring parts of the psyche: the id (the unconscious source of sexual and aggressive impulses); the superego (the internalization of parental
and societal morals — in effect, the conscience);
and the ego (the mediator between the id and
superego and the portion of the psyche most
cognizant of reality). Normally, this balancing
act staves off traumatic anxiety. But the threatening content continually seeks expression in
veiled form: through slips of the tongue, overvigorous denials and jokes, among other outlets
(such as dreams). For example, writer Patricia
Marx recounts about her many years in psychoanalysis that at the first session she told her therapist, “‘I’m not interested in being happy. I am
not interested in being happy. I’m not here because I want to be happy, I don’t care about
being happy, I really don’t want to be happy.’
And he interrupted me finally and said, ‘Don’t
worry!’” Comedian Richard Lewis, whose
shtick relies on complaints of his unhappiness,
would surely smile. If the repression is too severe, psychological symptoms result, for example, hysteria, neurosis, and compulsions. Case in
point: neat freak Felix Ungar and über slob
Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple.

The ego accomplishes its delicate work in part
through defense mechanisms, tricks of the mind
that recast forbidden content into things that may
be partially communicated and possibly partially
gratified. On The Carol Burnett Show, the titular
performer, as the indifferent secretary Mrs. Wiggins, and semi-regular Tim Conway, as the orderly businessman Mr. Tudball, send up pent-up
frustrations in the workplace in recurring skits.

Cole Porter obscures a sexual wish in “Let’s Do
It (Let’s Fall in Love),” a ditty about innuendo:
“Birds do it. / Bees do it. / Even educated flees
do it. / Let’s do it. / Let’s fall in love.” And
many comics and comedy writers believe humor
comes from the attempt to transform pain or
meet deprived needs. Just ask Hal Roach’s little
rascals or David Chase’s Tony Soprano.

Because some jokes contain implicit and thuspotentially unconscious communication, peopletell more than they know. (George Carlin, how-ever, would claim he went out of his irreverentway to tell exactly what he knew and nothingmore: the world’s problems.) Such “unknownknowledge,” made explicit in malapropisms orslips of the tongue (as well as in dreams, sym-bols, creative artwork, and psychoanalytic freeassociation), reveals the hidden motives — or“psychopathology,” to borrow the title ofFreud’s 1901 book — of everyday life. There isno such thing as an accidental phrasing accord-ing to psychoanalysis; the term “slip of thetongue” is ironic. Psychoanalysis treats theseparapraxes as revealing because they are consid-ered intentional, in fact, over-determined, pro-viding access to the unconscious. A favoriteFreudian slip for psychologists: “If it’s not onething, it’s your mother.”Comedian Norm Crosby, the Master ofMalaprop, built his act around such wordplay.

The literary source of malapropisms dates toMrs. Malaprop in Richard Sheridan’s Restora-tion comedy, The Rivals. He surely would havegotten a kick out of what I witnessed a fewmonths ago at a telephone store when a pushymiddle-aged female customer flirted with ayoung male clerk while demanding he exchangeher new phone for another in a different color.He pretended not to notice the sexual advances,and his coping tactic only made her increase thecome-ons. Thinking he could fulfill the requestfor a replacement phone, he said to her, “Let mecheck in back to make sure we have that before Ishoot myself in the mouth.” The combining of“shoot myself in the foot” and “put my foot inmy mouth” captured his embarrassment andoutrage, preventing him from saying out loudwhat he was feeling while enabling him to rejecther in a seemingly polite fashion. In fact, hepracticed self-restraint (silencing himself via afoot and gun in his mouth) to such a degree thatthe censoring suggests a very hobbling (shootinghimself in the mouth and foot) of the severity ofhis impulses, connoted by the verbalization of agun. His slip of the tongue illustrates Freud’sobservation in Jokes and Their Relation to theUnconscious from 1905 that if “we derive unmis-takable enjoyment in jokes from being transport-ed by the use of the same or a similar word fromone circle of ideas to another, remote one… thisenjoyment is no doubt correctly to be attributedto economy in psychical expenditure.”Explicit joke-telling ratchets up the require-ment in humor of the interpersonal element: thewitness. Freud wrote in Jokes that “no one can becontent with having made a joke for himselfalone. An urge to tell the joke to someone is inex-tricably bound up with the joke-work.” Successfulhumor entails satisfaction by the person makingthe joke and the person getting it. Groucho Marxdidn’t utter witticisms like “I never forget a face,but in your case I’ll be glad to make an excep-tion” and “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful eve-ning, but this wasn’t it” purely for his own amuse-ment. He dared listeners to pick up on his mes-sage about something (un)gratifiying.

Humor, therefore, occupies a transitional
space between exporter and importer, as object relations theory would understand it. Donald Winnicott, a key figure in this field, posited that a
baby is born in a merged state with the mother
and that only through optimal, tolerable frustrations provided by a “good-enough mother” do
the two become separate, thus acquainting the
baby with external reality. Winnicott famously
stated in 1947, “There is no such thing as a
baby,” meaning that baby and mother initially
exist as one for the baby until the mother,
through her responses and failures, scaffolds the
psychic development that permits the baby to
demarcate the two. (Freud, on the other hand,
put forth a one-person psychology, in which a
child has needs but who meets them is immaterial.) Winnicott termed the area of merger — in
which it is not clear to both baby and mother
who is whom (as in a baby nursing at the breast)
— “transitional space.” The merger is initially
bilateral; the mother joins with the infant to lend